My hat’s far from doffed at the rats in my loft,
they screech and they fight and they breed
from nine until two, when I’m trying to do
boring and gay things like read.
So mad am I driven I’m now almost given
to watching the satellite channels.
Gorblimey! I’d best get some finely-trained pest
control people to spank these wee mammals!
The directory’s peppered with offers of methods
that claim to be clean and precise.
“Got problems with squeaks? Our modern techniques
will free your existence of mice!
They’re quick and humane, causing minimum pain
and our charges won’t ‘trap’ you at all!”
Ho! Ho! Ho! Ho! Ho! Hee! Hee! Hee! Hee! Hee!
Haaa! Haaaaa! So I give them a call.
They’re round like a shot going clippety-clop
on their lovely big horses (ah, bless).
The flugelhorn’s sounding, they’re up on my landing
in ravishing red-coated dress,
all joking and larking as beagles go barking
up into my room in the sky.
I gaze up in general amazement and several
rat foetuses plop in my eye.
The screeching and braying and yelping and neighing
and galloping drowns out for hours
till a cobwebbed and pebbly nebula of debris
comes walloping down in dust-showers.
My bedspread’s now basically a collage of masonry
with headless rodent mixed in.
And then it all stops. No more clippety-clops.
There’s an end to the bestial din.
The trap at an end, the workmen descend
with a final and trickling toot
of their trumpeting music. There’s blood on their tunics
and spunk on their trousers to boot.
As I wipe the last trace of dead rat from my face
and we enter a tricky brief silence,
the boss says, through rubble, “Any more trouble,
just send for the Country Alliance!
Yes, we represent fifty-nine per cent
of the public, and all of the shires!”
I say, “How did Labour then gain enough favour
to govern the nation, you liars?
In the countryside quiet I watched your lot riot
and paste the police force with eggs.
When lefties do that, you dismiss them as prats,
dole-scroungers and scumbags and dregs.”
The boss is amazed I can speak a whole phrase
in its proper syntactical order.
He’s not been this shaken since he was o’ertaken
by a man with long hair in the Tour de
France, and he stops and then raises his crop
but before you can say Branston Pickle
I stuff his fat regal backside with a beagle
and slice off his tits with a sickle.
